ABSTRACT
Contemporaries regarded the Court of Wards as a corrupt institution, and its Master, Lord Burghley, as a corrupt man. The historian of the Court is indeed plentifully supplied with evidence which shows that the trade in wardships was an evil thing. The Elizabethans tried, with diminishing success, to draw a distinction between a bribe and a gift to a public servant. The evidence of corrupt and bullying practices by informers piled up before them and cried out for redress. The shadow of inquiries, fees, expenses, delay could be cast over and beyond the purely feudal sector of society. The middle years of the sixteenth century display a lamentable picture of the crown trying in vain to come to grips with the financial situation. Sometimes the contradictory qualities were combined in one and the same man, as in the case of the Earl of Essex.
